Larry Moss's learned review of Margaret Schabas's *Natural Origins of  
Economics* is stimulating, and immensely instructive. I wish he had  
nitpicked a bit more at some of her too-sweeping allegations.  
  
1. To say that economics has become "steadily more secular" is to imply it  
was not already so during The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason. The  
Physiocrats were not as militantly anti-clerical as their associate  
Voltaire, but part of the same culture that finally spawned the American and  
French Revolutions, and led to our First Amendment.  Adam Smith dismissed  
preachers as "ghostly practitioners" and would disestablish the Church.  
  
2. Moss quotes Hume that reason is only the slave of passion.  Pareto wrote  
the same a century later. Some of Knight's sayings could be interpreted that  
way; Samuelson was capable of dismissing certain good economic policy ideas  
because the public would never accept them. Many economists have swung with  
the passions of politics from Hooverites to Keynesians to neocons ... it's  
on the record.  
  
3. "Victorian" economists, including Mill, Wicksteed, Jevons and Marshall,  
are said to have severed economics from nature. One could certainly say that  
of the American J.B. Clark, but was it not Jevons who sounded an early alarm  
about running out of coal; and who tied business cycles to sunspots?  
Marshall's Principles contains a succinct explanation of how the scarcity of  
urban sites leads to high buildings, and Marshall supported Lloyd George's  
1909 Budget with its proposed tax on land values, complete with a strong  
statement on how to separate land values from building values. Wicksteed's  
work on distribution retains the 3 classical factors of production, although  
it is true that in the interests of mathematical elegance he makes parcels  
of land just as malleable as doses of labor, which calls for some suspension  
of disbelief. As for Mill, his last cause was the Land Tenure Reform  
Association, where he joined forces with Alfred Russel Wallace the pioneer  
evolutionist who went on to publish *Land Nationalization* in 1882.  
  
4. Moss corrects Schabas for apparently leaving the impression that modern  
economics has entirely left out nature. He might have strengthened his point  
by citing the growing literature on resource and environmental economics. If  
he had, though, he might also have deplored the compartmentalization of such  
studies from what specialists in "core" micro and macro economics modestly  
call "mainstream" economics, which remains as abstracted from earthly  
realities as the Laputans that Swift had Gulliver visit in his travels.  
  
Respectfully,  
  
Mason Gaffney